Pretentious art & book loving lowlife (mental patient)

Tag: Art Galleries

Enough of this lolling about, I need to organise my psychosis, shape up and get with the programme.

In March 2017 I experienced a six-week episode of improved motivation. For several years until then I had been subject to such a degree of Schizoaffective-induced lack of interest and anhedonia that I rarely left my flat. I’m frequently the same again now.

This window of desire and inclination coincided with me receiving therapy.

I am fortunate that I live in the South of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Regarding service provision, it is arguably the best place to be a mental patient in Britain. I have had extended periods of psychological intervention and haven’t just been fobbed-off with the usual short course of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT): 12 weeks, or ten weeks, or 6 weeks, or twenty minutes. Dr Jay Watts (Shrink at Largeon Twitter) has written that GPs in East London are being trained to administer 10-minute slices of CBT. It’s so miraculous that just a short burst of it with a family doctor and you’ll be as ripe as ninepence. It can cure everything from the blues to boredom to baldness.

Understandably, the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) are very keen on CBT. Mind doctors will be present wherever poor people gather – in health centres, in Greggs, down the bookies – ready to dispense work-related mercies and performance-enhancing kindness. Psychologists will be placed on every street corner as a precaution, available to spot any behaviour that can be used to diagnose a person as “fit-for-work”.

On the Psychotic & proud page, I refer to Therapy Types. I use this vague classification as I’m not clear what sort of therapy/counselling I received. I’m not convinced the therapists/counsellors were entirely sure what that they were administrating. It goes to the heart of the problem. How do you deal with someone who turns up one day engaged and reasonably articulate and the next day is all but mute and can’t make eye contact? Added to that is my need to cancel things at short notice because I believe people are trying to control my thoughts using a force called sonic or I’m going through a hefty session of visual hallucinations and don’t want to leave the house.

There seemed to be a constant ebb and flow of optimism as to what could be achieved, but in my most recent course of therapy, we settled on dealing with some of the most elemental problems resulting from my Schizoaffective-induced lack of get-up-and-go. I think the therapist started out with loftier ambitions but was a realist. I’m pointing this out as there are more militant Therapy Types out there who’ll want people in catatonic states to talk about their childhood, while others dismiss Anorexics who refuse to eat a burger and chips as being unwilling to engage with the process and beyond help.

We talked about me setting goals, a set of ambitions and daily destinations. I wondered if my having targets might be pitching it a bit high. We spoke about objectives and missions but settled on aspirations because for most of the time I can’t do more than just hope to achieve things. Even the most modest tasks can be distant dreams.

It took several weeks, but we managed to distil my bashful yearnings down to a prudent list.

Eight months later and I’ve edged slowly forward. It now contains broad areas combined with micromanagement.

I have some hours of the day allocated to “activity”. This includes the voluntary work I do, learning new things and creative endeavours such as writing this blog. There’s time set aside each day for reading and another block of time earmarked for art gallery visits.

The micromanagement would be better described as nano-management: I have reminders to record how much gas and electric I use each week, to check the carbon monoxide alarm and even to put a note next to the kettle on Thursday night to make sure I don’t forget to weigh myself on Friday mornings. I aspire to cut my toenails on Tuesday evenings.

My aspirations are in a Microsoft Word document called typicalweek.doc. I resave a copy of every Tuesday evening and plan my aspirations for the coming week, with my week beginning on Thursday as I get my Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) every other Thursday and that’s the day of the week that my care worker/cleaner comes.

You’ll be thinking this sounds amazing and that I must get so much done. That’s not how things pan out.

I have an idealised version of my life where I undertake a few light hours of activity in the morning – say, voluntary work – visit an art gallery in the afternoon, and come home and do some reading in the evening. In reality, I go for days or sometimes weeks at a time when if I manage to take my medication, brush my teeth and change my underpants I consider myself a high achiever.

No voluntary work gets done most weeks, and I had to publish the “Schizosomething is Unwell” post to explain the lack of updates on this site, and I have been nowhere near a gallery for more than a month now (the aim is to visit one three times a week).

Why?

The Sonic Phenomenon continues to dominate my life. For at least a third of the week, I struggle with the idea that people are trying to insert a force called sonic into my head and that they are trying to control my thoughts. This can often take up the whole of the week. At a low level, it can go on for weeks at a time. I have to consider myself lucky that overall I retain a fair degree of insight.

The Sonic Phenomenon is closely linked to motivation. You could set flat on fire, and I’d still lie in bed, and I procrastinate to an unfathomable degree. I thought I was becoming very ill again at the start of November 2017 as I kept saying to myself. “I’ll feed Schizo in ten minutes… I’ll feed Schizo in ten minutes”. Poor cat went unfed for a long time. Recovery in the binon Twitter advised me to get an automatic cat feeder.

I don’t like leaving the flat during one of my hallucination jam sessions. It’s not that I find these frightening – I know that some people experience terrifying visual hallucinations – I just have a sense of wariness of being around people. They can tell that I’m not in the present and that I’m mentally otherwise engaged.

Then there is my anxiety.

I saw my Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN) a few weeks ago and told him I never experienced anxiety like this before, though I speculated that I may have been too busy being mental in other ways to notice. Now when I leave home, I experience soaring dread. I feel jumpy and hypervigilant and constantly look around. I think I attract attention to myself as a result. For several weeks I haven’t felt equal to running the gauntlet of the motley collection of misfits who guard our palaces of art, especially the oddballs at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A).

In the street, on the tube and walking around Tesco I am terrified to make eye contact. I momentarily caught someone’s gaze while sitting in the local Tesco cafe. I thought they gave me a sour look. It was only when I glanced back at them that I realised it was their countenance. They just had one of those faces. Often I don’t spot these things and instead return to my digs thinking the world hates me.

Talking aloud in public and at home continues to be a problem. Outdoors, naturally, this attracts attention.

The only good news in all this is that I am reading more. For the first time in my life, I have a reading list in preference to ambling along from one book to another. It’s full of things I think I should have read (mostly fiction). It’s in a Word document, and I would put it here to download, but I’m too embarrassed for it to be publically known that I have such huge gaps in my fancy book learning.

There is a long-term quest. Apart from the weekly prompting to check my carbon monoxide alarm, my aspirations are primarily geared towards acquiring the skills required for greater self-expression. The learning aspect of the activity I described above includes web design stuff, making videos/podcasts and general digital tomfoolery. It will allow me to develop more of a voice. I bought a copy of Grammar for Writers to help me on my journey.

If I ever become well enough to think about paid work, maybe I will be able to go back to web design. If I end up washing dishes, at least I’ll have some sort of intellectual outlet to stop me going even more mental than I am already.

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“Schizosomething is Unwell” is a play on “Jeffery Bernard is Unwell” the statement which famously appeared when Jeffery Bernard was unable to produce his weekly column for The Spectator Magazine: unwell being a euphemism for worse the wear for drink, or downright drunk.

Bernard was a literary legend of London’s Soho who fraternized with the likes of Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett, Francis Bacon and other bohemians but was almost as well known for his feckless, chaotic lifestyle and inability to stay sober.

My lifestyle may be shambolic, but I am, however, sober. Haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since December 2016. I didn’t have a drink problem. I had a fat bastard problem. I needed to lose weight.

If you’re reading this, it means I have been unable to meet the demands of a “punishing” schedule producing 500-750 words a fortnight. I’m unwell with the Schizoaffective-induced lack of motivation I experience or one of the other symptoms that make my life such jolly japes.

There’s no need to send a get well soon email or leave a comment with a similar thought.

What am I doing? Probably lolling about half-heartedly listening to music or trying to read. I might still be up to playing with my accounts on Twitter or Instagram. At the very least I should be able to play with my cat, Schizo. If you’re reading this in Summer, I might be in St James’s Park.

This page will be posted whenever I don’t manage to write something new once a fortnight. Hopefully not very often. It will serve as a reminder for you to look at some previously published content – a shrewd editorial move – and I’m praying I’ll get it together enough to add some links to things elsewhere on the web to keep you entertained in my absence.

Obviously, you’ll wonder how I managed to produce this post. I worked on it for six months and just about had the wherewithal to (re)publish it now.

On Schizosomething:

Psychotic & proud: If you fancy a longer read, try this page. It includes my symptoms, medication, relationship with The Staff, my brilliant career and adventures in homelessness.

Elsewhere:

Patti Smith: This interview was undertaken by New York Public Library (NYPL) in 2010. She talks about youth, friendships and the artists and authors who inspired her. She sounds like an awestruck teen. She turned 71 in December 2017.

BBC Radio 3: Composer of the Week. Yes, I know this classical music show has been around since the stone age, and the podcast has probably been running since Queen Victoria came to the throne, but what can I say, I’m a late-developer, and I’m only just now getting into podcasts. It started as I can barely bring myself to watch television anymore. How does anyone? There are an impressive array of podcasts on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. Sadly, some can only be accessed in the UK.

The plan is to listen to Composer of the Week on Friday evening, and if I’m well enough, travel to Kensington Central Library on Saturday and collect some related CDs to listen to throughout the week. Only 40p each for poor old schizos and other disabled.

Madonna: Take a look at her Instagram account. No really. Now she’s not trying to look 25 all the time (she’s 59) her output is getting interesting again.

Alexa Chung: A young lovely I follow on Instagram (she’s 34, that’s not too bad for a 52-year-old to take an interest in and between 2002 and 2006 she lived with the photographer David Titlow who is twenty years her senior). I know there are gallons and gallons of stuff like this an Instagram, but I thought this was an exceptionally good example of the genre. Turn the volume up loud.

Featured image

It was the famed drinking den of Jeffery Bernard, as well as being the regular hangout of the staff of Private Eye. It is still is a Soho institution.

When I slept on the streets I spent most of my days sitting on the pavement outside it. Some building site workers from Old Compton Street befriended me and used to buy me bacon rolls from a nearby cafe in the mornings and pints of Guinness from the Coach & Horses in the evenings.

I thought there was a painting of Jeffery on the NPG site, but I can’t find it. However, I think it’s the same painting used on the cover of Just the One: The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard 1932-1997. I’ve read this biography and agree with a reviewer who described it as spiteful. That said, overall it was a good read: you can get it from Amazon (but unfortunately not on Hive).

Finally, the column Jeffery Bernard is Unwell was adapted for the stage by the writer and journalist Kieth Waterhouse. It was originally staged in 1989 starring Peter O’Toole. There’s was a rapturous review in the Evening Standard for the 1999 revival.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, I hope that you have a Happy Christmas.

I’ll be enjoying a traditional Christmas, by which I mean I’ll be spending it alone with my cat. I don’t get lonely at Christmas for the same reason I never get lonely throughout the year: far too self-absorbed. I have no idea how people find the time for family and friends at Christmas. There’s so much to enjoy this time of year.

Pity the poor gallery-goer. Being pretentious is exhausting. No wonder I see Christmas as a much-needed break from people.

Every Christmas Eve I like to listen to carols on Classic FM. On Christmas Day at 1 pm, there is The Nation’s Favourite Carols top 30 countdown. You can listen to last year’s winners on site, and there’s a brief guide to each carol. I mostly like the pagan-influenced, The Holly & The Ivy and In the Bleak mid-Winter (Gustav Holst version), that sort of thing.

Another Christmas pleasure will be Neil Gaiman Reads Charles Dickens’s Original Performance Script for “A Christmas Carol”, on Brain Pickings. Maria Popova describes A Christmas Carol as, “the classic 1843 novella, which blends elements of science fiction, philosophy, mysticism, satire, and cultural critique to tell a timeless story about the benevolence of the human spirit and our heartening capacity for transformation and self-transcendence”.

I’ll be listening to it after I have enjoyed my Christmas lunch, supplied by my lovely neighbour Sue (I eat fish, but I don’t eat meat, so I’ll give the turkey a miss).

Post lunch I’ll be thinking how lucky I am to have a decent meal and not have to rely on a foodbank, though I’m sure foodbanks do their best to provide something festive. It’s been a year now since I stopped drinking alcohol, so I donated the money I would have spent on booze this Christmas to the local foodbank.

Primarily a result of stopping drinking I have lost four stone in weight during the past year (on top of two stone the previous year). When I come to weigh myself next week, I will have put it all back on. When I sat down to write this at 11.25am on Christmas Eve, I had already scoffed four Mr Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells. I bought a family-sized strawberry trifle for Christmas and Boxing Day, and I can see me having it for breakfast. What is it with food and Christmas? We’re no longer peasants celebrating the passing of the Winter solstice, having survived another year. There’s no need for this gluttonous abandon.

Featured image: Fortnum & Mason window. There are some behind the scenes photos of the making of their Christmas window display. The photo was taken with my iPhone, December 2017.

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I’m going through a period of very poor motivation which explains the lack of updates here. Maybe it’s the season. I’ve become a two-nap-a-day person over the past month. Then again, it could be the medication. Sodium valproate, the mood stabiliser I take, is known to leave you feeling exhausted.

It’s lovely having the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance on my doorstep. If only I felt a bit more comfortable sitting in their cafe and the staff were a tad more welcoming. They’re welcoming to the Poppys & Millys – I’d better not start, already said enough in the post Creative accounting.

A post shared by Schizosomething (@schizosomething) on Nov 28, 2017 at 11:03am PST

Featured image: A photo of the Winnie-the-Pooh exhibition poster, taken with my iPhone, November 2017.

The title, “An old grey donkey,” is taken from the Wikipedia page about the character Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh. Apparently, he had a low opinion of the other animals in the forest, saying they had, “No brains at all, some of them”.

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This post has now been superseded by a more recent post detailing my submission to the Work & Pensions Committee inquiry: see In my room.

I’m leaving this post here so that you can learn about my pretentiousness and neophobia, while enjoying a gallery of poverty porn from the Parisian world of the fin de siècle.

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Parliament’s Work & Pensions Committee is undertaking an inquiry into Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) assessments. Committee Chair, Frank Field MP, has said, “We would like to hear from claimants – and assessors – about whether and where the system works or is failing, and how it might be fixed”.

Of course, I see this as an opportunity for new heights of pretention. I thought I’d make a video to illustrate the fact that I need PIP as I spend 90% of my time in one room due to various symptoms (see Psychotic & proud).

The problem is, despite having my current iMac for eight years, I have never opened iMovie and don’t know where to start. Neophobia, same reason I have never tried sushi. I’m 52!

I have managed to choose some music for the soundtrack. When I overcome my timidity I’ll open iMovie. This will probably be at Christmas, but it’ll give me something to do while complaining that there’s nothing on the telly and I don’t know why I pay the license fee etc. This week I was reduced to watching one of the adult channels. No! I mean BBC4. It’ll be opera on Sky Arts next.

For now, you’ll have to settle for some poverty porn from the Parisian fin de siècle. These printmakers were at it long before Channel 5.

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It’s not been the best of weeks. I have been troubled by very bad visual hallucinations, as well as the usual psychotic symptoms (see Psychotic & proud). I only left the flat once, though I managed to do a big supermarket shop and visit the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) to see The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt (now sadly finished, but the web page is still worth looking at for films and essays). The exhibition was extremely good.

I know you shouldn’t think about Christmas till December, but while at the NPG I bought my Christmas cards, good value at £6.50 for 20. They have a wide selection. You can cross the road and get charity Christmas cards for half the price at St-Martin-in-the-fields (or even less at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Lidl, or down the market, obviously), but charities often only get a small percentage of the profits – though maybe the big names like Oxfam with branded cards do better.

I think major galleries do well. If you have a click around, you can see that they put some real effort into it, especially the Tate. If you’re an arts wankery enthusiast like me I recommend buying from galleries and if you’re in London visiting and so saving yourself the postage.

But all this has been a distraction. What preoccupied me most of the week apart from the psychosis was the news reporting of the rollout of Universal Credit.

If you’ve come here via Twitter and share my interests most of the following may be familiar to you, but I have covered some things you may have missed.

If I hear the phrases “Simplify the benefits system” and “Make work pay” one more time I’m going to headbutt the telly. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that you’ll need a Ph.D. in semiotics to receive Universal Credit and many people are going to be thousands of pounds a year worse off.

I know from the voluntary work I do for a charity that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) forms for new employees don’t include Universal Credit: not even the taxman can cope with it!

Women’s Aid has raised concerns about the benefit being paid into a single bank account for a couple (people were previously paid separately). This is a return to the traditional “single breadwinner” concept, taking us back several decades, with potential for abusive men to withhold money from wives and girlfriends. I’ve not seen references to it but I assume the same could apply to LGBTQ couples/civil partnerships.

Universal Credit has only been rolled out in a small part of the country and already Citizens Advice is overwhelmed and people are crowdfunding to train volunteers to help people apply. The Child Poverty Action Group has calculated that lone parent families – many of them in work – will lose a massive £2.380 a year on average by 2020. Making work pay?

Some of the Department of Work and Pensions’s (DWP) own staff are in revolt. A whistleblower told the New Statesman:

“As a case manager, turning away those in abject poverty is a part of the job. Those who have worked in Universal Credit since the early days have become hardened, having dealt with thousands of vulnerable people. It’s very difficult to tell claimants, “I’m sorry but we can’t give you any more”, even if we know that children will suffer and go hungry for weeks”.

A DWP spokesperson gave the usual glib response “Our frontline staff offer invaluable support to people facing difficult circumstances”.

Six benefits that have been rolled into one to create Universal Credit (Income Support, Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, Income-related Employment Support Allowance, Housing Benefit, Working Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit).

They are now referred to as, “Legacy benefits”. Does someone have a sense of humour?

These benefits were designed for people who were too disabled or ill to work, people unemployed because there was no suitable work and to top-up low wages and cover high housing costs.

(If you’re familiar with the basic history of the welfare state you skip the next three paragraphs).

The origin of the welfare state is rooted in the acknowledgment that work frequently isn’t available and income needs to be provided to avoid a large number of people being destitute: see The Guardian Long Read, Why we need the welfare state more than ever.

The Beverage Report published in 1942 established the modern welfare state, offering welfare “from the cradle to the grave” and identifying the five “Giant Evils” in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. Underlying all this was a belief that the state had a moral duty to intervene, though Beverage argued the state, “should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility”.

When launched the Beverage Report proved hugely popular with the public – more than 600,000 copies flew off the shelves – and it fitted the mood of the time. The war gave society a sense of common purpose and social solidarity. People across the social classes were brought together in a way that had never happened previously, there was a new found respect for the common man. Since the beginning, much of the welfare state enjoyed support across the political spectrum.

You may be wondering how I know all this – famously, I have only one O level (geography).

Apart from the fact that I can google and wiki to my heart’s content, before I effectively dropped out of school at 14 (see Psychotic & proud), I was taught about the welfare state. We all were back in the 70s. Are kids now?

It was our thing, it was intricately linked to working-class identity. Our grandparents had fought a war for it, along with the NHS. It was our heritage, it was our LEGACY.

My mother likes to talk about the Land Girls in her sheltered housing scheme: they were heroines for a generation of women. After their sacrifice, they now have granddaughters who regularly go without food to afford childcare, who face cuts to benefits that just about enable them to survive, and could well have to turn to foodbanks.

We all know about benefit claimants, they are presented on Channel 5 documentaries as obese, heavily tattooed chain-smokers and heavy drinkers, slumped in front of the telly when not being promiscuous, only venturing out to the bookies or to Greggs for a steak bake, while stopping off on the way home to commitment some antisocial behaviour – and that’s just the women.

They are scroungers and skivers, living off the backs of the strivers and hardworking families.

The assumption behind Universal Credit is that it is addressing personal failings, lack of responsibility, “welfare dependency”. It ignores the fact that some people are unable to work through disability or illness and it ignores the fact that in a lot of Britain there are simply no jobs.

Within ten minutes walk of where I am sitting writing this, there are two employment agencies. If I were well enough to work (I’m not, see the Psychotic & proud ), I could arrive at eight in the morning, and assuming they were happy with my documents, I could be in work by nine. But this is London, with its pressing need for hospitality staff. If I didn’t fancy that there’s always warehouse work, perhaps I could get a forklift truck driver’s license. Sainsbury’s are crying out for people – I could get a discount when I do my weekly shop.

I don’t need to point out the reality to people outside London and the South-east reading this, especially not to people in the old industrial heartlands, many rural communities, much of Wales and Scotland.

People have said that Universal Credit is Theresa May’s Poll Tax, but Universal Credit makes the Poll Tax look like Disney (interesting historical note, Lord Freud, one of the chief architects of Universal Credit, helped steer the stock market flotation of Eurodisney). The Spectator Magazine published a hagiographyof Lord Freud by the journalist Peter Oborne. I’ve liked some of Peter Oborne’s journalism. One time I saw him on the tube at High Street Kensington – he didn’t appear to be the village idiot.

Lord Freud is now denying the six-week wait for a Universal Credit payment was his idea. Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) is also denying that it was his idea. IDS, always keen to appeal to the reasonable man in the street, is in favour of a four-week wait for money for people to be able to buy food.

It has cost £15bn plus to date, and Universal Credit, along with other welfare reform, is having a catastrophic effect on other public services, those provided by local authorities and the NHS. It’s well documented that various welfare reforms have cost more to implement than they have saved. We don’t hear a peep from our old friends at the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Politician, charities, church groups and others have pleaded with the government to halt the rollout of Universal Credit in the run-up to Christmas. Have you not read Dickens they say, fearing a return to Victorian levels of poverty and squalor.

Was there a subliminal influence in my choice of Christmas cards this year?

But we’re expected to return to a golden age where people “took responsibility” and had “self-reliance”, where there was no “welfare dependency”.

I tell you who are going to be the loudest voices calling for the slow-down in of the rollout of Universal Credit? The insurance industry. At the moment the public still appears to believe that Universal Credit is “simplifying the benefits system” and “making work pay”. Eventually, it will get out into the culture that what we had – our legacy – has been taken away and there’s next to nothing for you if you lose your job or fall ill. There will be a stampede to buy income protection insurance. Too much growth can be as bad as too little, companies don’t want to expand too quickly. They will need help from the government and will get subsidises to cope with demand, former ministers and DWP civil servants will become advisors and join boards.

No doubt there will be a wave a mass public revulsion when people wake up to what has been done. The Tories may be swept out of power again as they were in 1997. But will it be too late by then? Apart from the ravages of welfare reform, have public services been fatally undermined since 2010, the austerity years? What will it take for our society to recover?

I have been a rough sleeper and have an impressive homelessness portfolio including Soho streets, hostels, squats/derelict buildings, local authority temporary accommodation etc.

I have one O level (Geography).

I fancy myself as a bit of an autodidact. More Ernest Hemingway/Frida Kahlo than Adolf Hitler.

I have been a voluntary sector playboy, writing fundraising applications for small charities and community groups and undertaking web design. I now do occasional voluntary work when mental health permits.

I write about mental health, assorted arts wankery and life as one of the abandoned. I try to get my facts straight. I’m not making any promises about the grammar.

Please note I’m going to punch the next person on Twitter who calls me a hipster: apart from being 52 (!) I have a proud industrial working-class heritage. One of my favourite accounts on Instagram is blackcountrytype.